Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence

DARK ECOLOGY

THE WELLEK LIBRARY LECTURES IN CRITICAL THEORY

The Wellek Library Lectures in Critical Theory are given annually at the University of California, Irvine, under the auspices of the Critical Theory Institute. The following lectures were given in May 2014

THE CRITICAL THEORY INSTITUTE

Gabriele Schwab, Director

DARK ECOLOGY

For a Logic of Future Coexistence

TIMOTHY MORTON

Columbia University Press

New York

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2016 Columbia University Press

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E-ISBN 978-0-231-54136-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Morton, Timothy, 1968– author.

Title: Dark ecology: for a logic of future coexistence / Timothy Morton.

Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2016. |

Series: Wellek Library lectures in critical theory | Includes bibliographical references and index

Identifiers: LCCN 2015026796 | ISBN 9780231177528 (cloth : alk. paper) |

ISBN 9780231541367 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Nature—Effect of human beings on—Philosophy. | Human beings—Effect of environment on—Philosophy. | Human ecology—Philosophy. | Naturalness (Environmental sciences)

Classification: LCC GF75.M685 2016 | DDC.2—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015026796

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

Cover design by Julia Kushnirsky

Cover illustration by Hannah Stouffer

References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

For Allan

It was surprising how pure the sense of loss was—in a sense it’s because nonhumans don’t have the same mediation with humans. I mean, you know your grandma or whoever is sick and that there is a hospital, there is a timeline of some kind. That and the fact that the outside (I should know this by now) is actually the (human) inside, so it’s strangely like losing a child to war. It’s a war zone against nonhumans.

He was hit by the mail truck, the new delivery person having a habit of driving up the driveway. The worst aspect was that he tried to crawl back in with a smashed neck and head, so I found him right outside the cat door, still warm yet with rigor mortis. We buried him like an Egyptian with his favorite things and did a Buddhist death ritual right away. For the next few days we were totally rigid with depression, which slowly liquefied.

He wasn’t murdered—though for a moment the obvious blunt force trauma to his neck looked very like it. One of my friends had a cat who was indeed killed by some psychopath who showed her the cat’s body in his freezer. Nevertheless Allan Whiskersworth was killed by humans in a friendly fire collateral damage sort of way. Cats weirdly symbolize the ambiguous border between agricultural logistics and its (impossible to demarcate) outside. I mean we don’t let dogs just wander about. It’s as if we want to use cats to prove to ourselves that there is a Nature. Allan was very happy bristling among the grasses and talking to his friend, the gray cat. He lived a Neil Young sort of life (burning out) and died at only two years old. I’ve always liked Lennon’s response that he’d much rather fade away (and look what happened to him).

Right after his death the Charon-like gray cat came to visit, never before or since.

Progress means: humanity emerges from its spellbound state no longer under the spell of progress as well, itself nature, by becoming aware of its own indigenousness to nature and by halting the mastery over nature through which nature continues its mastery.

Theodor Adorno

Dark is dangerous. You can’t see anything in the dark, you’re afraid. Don’t move, you might fall. Most of all, don’t go into the forest. And so we have internalized this horror of the dark.

Hélène Cixous

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Beginning After the End

The First Thread

The Second Thread

The Third Thread

Ending Before the Beginning

Notes

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is a version of the Wellek Lectures that I gave in May 2014 at the University of California, Irvine. My thanks go to Georges Van Den Abeele, dean of humanities, for having invited me and for being a huge inspiration on this project. Georges and a host of scholars kindly donated their intellects for three days at UC Irvine, near the set of Conquest of Planet of the Apes, including Ackbar Abbas, Ellen Burt, David Theo Goldberg, Martin Harries, Andrea Henderson, Jayne Lewis, Julia Lupton, Glen Mimura, Beryl Schlossman, Gabriele Schwab, Michael Szalay, and Christopher Tomlins.

Thanks so much to my editor at Columbia University Press, Jennifer Crewe. Her intellectual generosity and accurate perception were invaluable. And thanks to my dean, Nicholas Shumway, whose unfailing support and encouragement has been such a gift over the last three years.

A great deal of the research that went into this book would not have been possible without the steady and generous correspondence of Dirk Felleman, Jarrod Fowler, and Cliff Gerrish. Thank you, friends. And thank you to my tireless research assistants, Jade Hagan and Mallory Pladus.

In the fall of 2014 a sound art collective called Sonic Acts started the Dark Ecology art project, inspired by my thoughts on the topic at hand since 2004. My thanks to all those who have invited me to talk at numerous events and witness the iron smelter at Nikel in Arctic Russia. I am particularly grateful to Arie Altena, Lucas van der Velden, and Annette Wolfsberger. For the last three years, Katherine Behar’s invitations to participate in the Object-Oriented Feminism panels at the Society for the Study of Literature, Science, and the Arts have been invaluable.

A host of artists, curators, and scholars have contributed invaluable things to this project. Thoughts are interactive, and Q&A sessions are my lab. For their incredible help and kindness, my heartfelt thanks also go to Mirna Belina, Klaus Biesenbach, Dominic Boyer, Joseph Campana, Martin Clark, Thomas Claviez, Jeffrey Cohen, Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Lowell Duckert, Olafur Eliasson, William Elliott, Ine Gevers, Alejandro Ghersi, Jón and Jøga Gnarr, Rune Graulund, Richard Grossinger, Björk Guðmundsdóttir, Graham Harman, Erich Hörl, Cymene Howe, Serenella Iovino, Chuck Johnson, Toby Kamps, Douglas Kahn, Jeffrey Kripal, Jae Rhim Lee, Charles Long, Frenchy Lunning, Andrea Mellard, James Merry, Hilde Methi, Julia Nuessiein, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Henk Oosterling, Serpil Opperman, John Palmesino, Heather Pesanti, Karen Pinkus, Albert Pope, Ann Sofi Rönnskog, Judith Roof, Nicholas Royle, Miljohn Ruperto, Maria Rusinovskaya, Roy Sellars, Rhoda Seplowitz, Christopher Schaberg, Emilija Škarnulyte, Haim Steinbach, Thom van Dooren, Leslie Uppinghouse, Gediminas Urbonas, Lynn Voskuil, Laura Walls, Cary Wolfe, Carolyn Wyatt, and Marina Zurkow.

The cute ouroboros was drawn for me by the magical Ian Bogost.

BEGINNING AFTER THE END

There are thoughts we can anticipate, glimpsed in the distance along existing thought pathways.

This is a future that is simply the present, stretched out further.

There is not-yet-thought that never arrives—yet here we are thinking it in the paradoxical flicker of this very sentence.

If we want thought different from the present—if we want to change the present—then thought must be aware of this kind of future.

It is not a future into which we can progress.

This future is unthinkable. Yet here we are, thinking it.

Coexisting, we are thinking future coexistence. Predicting it and more: keeping the unpredictable one open.

Yet such a future, the open future, has become taboo.

Because it is real, yet beyond concept.

Because it is weird.

Art is thought from the future. Thought we cannot explicitly think at present. Thought we may not think or speak at all.

If we want thought different from the present, then thought must veer toward art.

To be a thing at all—a rock, a lizard, a human—is to be in a twist.

How thought longs to twist and turn like the serpent poetry!

Or is art veering toward thought? Does it ever arrive?

The threads of fate have tied our tongues.

Tongue twisters inclined towards nonsense.

Logic includes nonsense as long as it can tell the truth.

The logic of nonsense.

The needle skipped the groove of the present.

Into this dark forest you have already turned.

I take present to mean for the last twelve thousand years. A butterfly kiss of geological time.

THE FIRST THREAD

Each outcry from the hunted Hare A fibre from the Brain does tear

What is happening?

The field had already been opened…a lane a few feet wide had been hand-cut through the wheat along the whole circumference of the field for the first passage of the horses and machine.

Two groups, one of men and lads, the other of women, had come down the lane just at the hour when the shadows of the eastern hedge-top struck the west hedge midway, so that the heads of the groups were enjoying sunrise while their feet were still in the dawn…

Presently there arose from within a ticking like the lovemaking of the grasshopper. The machine had begun, and a moving concatenation of three horses and the aforesaid long rickety machine was visible over the gate…. Along one side of the field the whole wain went, the arms of the mechanical reaper revolving slowly…

The narrow lane of stubble encompassing the field grew wider with each circuit, and the standing corn was reduced to a smaller area as the morning wore on. Rabbits, hares, snakes, rats, mice, retreated inwards as into a fastness, unaware of the ephemeral nature of their refuge, and of the doom that awaited them later in the day when, their covert shrinking to a more and more horrible narrowness, they were huddled together…till the last few yards of upright wheat fell also under the teeth of the unerring reaper, and they were every one put to death by the sticks and stones of the harvesters.

The reaping-machine left the fallen corn behind it in little heaps, each heap being of the quantity for a sheaf; and upon these the active binders in the rear laid their hands—mainly women, but some of them men…

[The women] were the most interesting of this company of binders, by reason of the charm which is acquired by woman when she becomes part and parcel of outdoor nature…. A field-man is a personality afield; a field-woman is a portion of the field; she had somehow lost her own margin…and assimilated herself with it.

…There was one wearing a pale pink jacket…

Her binding proceeds with clock-like monotony. From the sheaf last finished she draws a handful of ears, patting their tips with her left palm to bring them even. Then, stooping low, she moves forward, gathering the corn with both hands against her knees, and pushing her left gloved hand under the bundle to meet the right on the other side, holding the corn in an embrace like that of a lover. She brings the ends of the bond together, and kneels on the sheaf while she ties it, beating back her skirts now and then when lifted by the breeze. A bit of her naked arm is visible…and as the day wears on its feminine smoothness becomes scarified by the stubble and bleeds.¹

It’s the machine age, yet uncannily it isn’t: it’s fields and wheat. Or are the fields already a kind of machine? People appear as machinelike components, legs, clothing, arms, and hands moving. Tess of the D’Urbervilles, a fictional farming girl from 1891, appears as if she were a piece of a gigantic device, yet she also as a human individual, exemplifying a weird contradiction between being and appearing.² Seeing this contradiction, enabled by the machination of steam engines and Kantian code, forces us to think a far, far older machination, still churning. A twelve-thousand-year structure, a structure that seems so real we call it Nature. The slowest and perhaps most effective weapon of mass destruction yet devised.³

What is dark ecology?⁴ It is ecological awareness, dark-depressing. Yet ecological awareness is also dark-uncanny. And strangely it is dark-sweet. Nihilism is always number one in the charts these days. We usually don’t get past the first darkness, and that’s if we even care. In this book we are going to try to get to the third darkness, the sweet one, through the second darkness, the uncanny one. Do not be afraid.

What thinks dark ecology? Ecognosis, a riddle. Ecognosis is like knowing, but more like letting be known. It is something like coexisting. It is like becoming accustomed to something strange, yet it is also becoming accustomed to strangeness that doesn’t become less strange through acclimation. Ecognosis is like a knowing that knows itself. Knowing in a loop—a weird knowing. Weird from the Old Norse urth, meaning twisted, in a loop.⁵ The Norns entwine the web of fate with itself; Urðr is one of the Norns.⁶ The term weird can mean causal: the winding of the spool of fate. The less well-known noun weird means destiny or magical power and, by extension, the wielders of that power, the Fates or Norns.⁷ In this sense weird is connected with worth, not the noun but the verb, which has to do with happening or becoming.⁸

Weird: a turn or twist or loop, a turn of events. The milk turned sour. She had a funny turn. That weather was a strange turn-up for the book. Yet weird can also mean strange of appearance.⁹ That storm cloud looks so weird. She is acting weird. The milk smells weird. Global weirding.

In the term weird there flickers a dark pathway between causality and the aesthetic dimension, between doing and appearing, a pathway that dominant Western philosophy has blocked and suppressed. We shall be traveling down this pathway because it provides an exit route from the machinelike functioning of Tess’s field. Now the thing about seeming is that seeming is never quite as it seems. Dark Ecology is going to argue that appearance is always strange. We discern yet another pathway, a route between the term weird and the term faerie.¹⁰ Faerie also comes from a word for fate and suggests a supernatural illusion-like magical appearance as well as a kind of unearthly realm:

weird << urth (Norse) = Norn = twisting fate = fatum (Latin) >> fay >> faerie

Though the web of fate is so often invoked in tragedy, that default agricultural mode, words such as weird and faerie evoke the animistic world within the concept of the web of fate itself. The dark shimmering of faerie within fate is a symptom of what Dark Ecology is going to attempt. We are going to try to see how we Mesopotamians have never left the Dreaming. So little have we moved that even when we thought we were awakening we had simply gathered more tools for understanding that this was in fact a lucid dream, even better than before.

Weird weirdness. Ecological awareness is weird: it has a twisted, looping form. Since there is no limit to the scope of ecological beings (biosphere, solar system), we can infer that all things have a loop form. Ecological awareness is a loop because human interference has a loop form, because ecological and biological systems are loops. And ultimately this is because to exist at all is to assume the form of a loop. The loop form of beings means we live in a universe of finitude and fragility, a world in which objects are suffused with and surrounded by mysterious hermeneutical clouds of unknowing. It means that the politics of coexistence are always contingent, brittle, and flawed, so that in the thinking of interdependence at least one being must be missing. Ecognostic jigsaws are never complete.

What kind of weirdness are we talking about? Weird weirdness. Weird means strange of appearance; weirdness means the turning of causality. Let’s focus this idea by thinking about the many kinds of ecological loops. There are positive feedback loops that escalate the potency of the system in which they are operating. Antibiotics versus bacteria. Farmers versus soil, creating the Dust Bowl in the Midwestern United States in the 1930s. Such loops are common in human command and control approaches to environmental management, and they result in damage to ecosystems.¹¹ Some of them are unintended: consider the decimation of bees in the second decade of the twenty-first century brought on by the use of pesticides that drastically curtail pollination.¹² Such unintended consequences are weirdly weird in the sense that they are uncanny, unexpected fallout from the myth of progress: for every seeming forward motion of the drill bit there is a backward gyration, an asymmetrical contrary motion.

Then there are the negative feedback loops that cool down the intensity of positive feedback loops. Think of thermostats and James Lovelock’s Gaia. There are phasing loops. We encounter them in beings such as global warming, beings that are temporally smeared in such a way that they come in and out of phase with human temporality. (This book is going to call it global warming, not climate change.)¹³

Yet there is another loop, the dark-ecological loop: a strange loop. A strange loop is one in which two levels that appear utterly separate flip into one another. Consider the dichotomy between moving and being still. In Lewis Carroll’s haunting story, Alice tries to leave the Looking Glass House. She sets off through the front garden, yet she finds herself returning to the front door via that very movement.¹⁴ A strange loop is weirdly weird: a turn of events that has an uncanny appearance. And this defines emerging ecological awareness occurring to civilized people at this moment.

Two kinds of weird: a turning and a strange appearing, and a third kind, the weird gap between the two. The Anthropocene names two levels we usually think are distinct: geology and humanity. Since the late eighteenth century humans have been depositing layers of carbon in Earth’s crust. In 1945 there occurred the Great Acceleration of the Anthropocene, marked by a huge data spike in the graph of human involvement in Earth systems. The Anthropocene binds together human history and geological time in a strange loop, weirdly weird. Consider how personal this can get. There you were, shoveling coal into your steam engine, that great invention patented in 1784 that Marx hails as the driver of industrial capitalism. The very same machine that Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer hail as the instigator of the Anthropocene.¹⁵ The year 1784 is not the earliest date for a steam engine patent, but the language of the 1784 patent describes the engine as a general-purpose machine that can be connected to any other machine in order to power it. This general-purpose quality enables the industrial turn.

There you are, turning the ignition of your car. And it creeps up on you. You are a member of a massively distributed thing. This thing is called species. Yet the difference between the weirdness of my ignition key twist and the weirdness of being a member of the human species is itself weird. Every time I start